Maximum PC

I have a 4 month old Samsung F3 1 TB Hard Drive that is having problems. Had it in another computer and the PC crashed a couple of times. Then Windows kept wanting to do CHKDSK. It never found any problems.

So I decide it is time to try to salvage the files I did not backup off the drive. I only backup critical crap.

Problem is the transfer speed is around 450 kB/second and I am trying to copy around 460 GB. It IS working. It is not making any strange sounds. I HAVE managed to copy off 43 GB and those files are all good so far on the other drive. Took about a day. I am patient but I am afraid the drive will fail completely before I finish.

Any idea as to what may be causing this? The drive was mainly used for saving files in large chunks from other drives. Very seldom was anything deleted so Fragmentation should not be the issue.
I have tried it in 2 separate PCs with the same results. I have it hooked through SATA.

Could the controller board be causing this? I have ordered other F3s. Is it worth a shot to see if one of those controller boards might help?

Any ideas?

I think the files are badly fragmented and that is why it is taking so long. If the drive is dieing you are making it twice as hard to transfer files and folders because they are scattered in pieces all over the drive.

Nasty

Specs?

Personally, I'd be breaking out a linux cd. mounting the drive and copying from there.

Ok.

^ Nasty, Why do you believe the files are fragmented?

The drive started out blank and I copied files from other hard drives to it. Many of the files are several hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes. If I copied them over from other drives and considering there was ample free space on the drive then should they not have been copied fairly unfragmented? I mean it is possible that a file may be broken into a few pieces but they should be 10s of megabytes or more together. I have had transfers between 50 - 60 MBs with this drive before all this happened.

Even if the files were fragmented on the source drives if they were sequentially copied over to a blank drive with no deletions then shouldn't they be contiguous?


^furball146 What would a linux cd help? This is not a boot drive or system drive. I use it for data only. Are you talking about doing a copy by sectors? I don't know squat about linux. Copying by sectors sounds like a good idea but I am unfamiliar with the tools. Just curious how fast should a copy of an entire 1TB F3 be? Any reasonable guesses as to how many hours it should take?

The computer it is hooked to is an old P4 with 1280 MB Ram. All other drives transfer with nice speeds. But like I said even in this system I have had nice speeds before with this very drive.

Your responses make me think I am missing something guys.

And your point?



No, I'm talking about doing an everyday copy and paste.



Clearly. I'm sorry I suggested it.



You should be able to do this with Ghost, Acronis, or clonezilla.



There's really no secret code here. you are trying to copy a metric butload of files. Perhaps just performing smaller cut and pastes would be in order.

Bring up your defragmenter and click on analyze only, it will show you how fragmented your source drive is then choose the drive you are transferring the files/folders to and click on analyze again. The cpu don't give a damn where your data ends up on a hard drive as long as it all gets there and that is why you defrag a drive after loading a program or lots of data. The cluster size causes the fragmentation.

Nasty

Ok well I can check the fragmentation when I get home. I did think about it but I was reluctant to do a check because I thought it could take it a long while and that was precious time the drive could be copying data.

I thought when you did a usual copy and paste the files were copied in sector order. So if a file was 100 sectors then it would copy all 100 sectors in order to the target location as long as there were no gaps of unused space between files already on the drive for some of the sectors to go in. Maybe not?


And furball146, I am not against learning about doing a copy using a linux cd with dd but if I am going to do a normal copy and paste what would be the advantage over what I am doing in Windows?

Here is the fragmentation report for the failing drive.
Volume (Q:)
Volume size = 731 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 365 GB
Free space = 366 GB
Percent free space = 50 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 0 %
File fragmentation = 0 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 245,956
Average file size = 2 MB
Total fragmented files = 48
Total excess fragments = 62
Average fragments per file = 1.00

Here is the report for the drive I am copying everything to.

Volume (E:)
Volume size = 868 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 88.88 GB
Free space = 779 GB
Percent free space = 89 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 0 %
File fragmentation = 0 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 21,629
Average file size = 6 MB
Total fragmented files = 0
Total excess fragments = 0
Average fragments per file = 1.00

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 0 bytes
Total fragments = 0

If this is win7, it defrags in the background, that is why all the flies are not fragmented. Maybe if you shut the defragmenter down during the transfer, the transfer may go faster.

Nasty

Please stop trying to destroy a failing drive. No defrag! No write tests! Get the friggin data off first then you can play to your hearts content!!!! Hopefully you also tried a different data cable.

Image the drive to another drive using the free version of Macrium Reflect. It is fast and rather robust (as is Acronis). If that fails due to too many errors thenconsult this.

Then, if you really want to diagnose the drive you can run Samsung's ESTOOL HDD diag app. ISO file for CD-R. Boot it up. Sooooooooo much better than chkdsk.

Absolutely, BUT it will only work IF the HDD controller board is the same firmware revision as the failed drive's board.

Ideas: You don't say what app you are using to transfer. If it was Linux's (which it isn't) dd command (or some variant, which is what I use on really failed drives to plow my way through sector by sector recovery) I'd say you forgot to set a high buffer which would take many days to recover at the default of 512 (buffer should be set around 32,000). I figure transfer time at about 1 hour per 100Gb of sectors; it is usually faster than that however. I'd figure 30 minutes with Macrium Reflect if the drive was nearly full.

For fastest transfer, I set a SATA drive to SATA drive connected through the MB's SATA controller usually on split channel (i.e., odd and even number ports) though that isn't as important on newer controllers. [This could also be done on an external tray using either an eSATA port or USB3. You are correct, you want to go as fast as possible in case the drive fails.] You should be using your best system for transfer...P4 (socket 478?) with 1.25 Gb?!!!! I assume you have a SATA card installed. Doable but not ideal.

I am using old Windows XP Professional, neutered so things don't run in the background. There is no fragmentation because there have been few deletions!

I have not performed any defragmentation nor do I intend to. Same thing for write tests, I am just reporting what I see. I tried both Windows native copy and I am using a little program called Xplorer2. It reports the speed as it copies.

All I have is a P4 2.2 GHz and a 2 year newer but worse Celeron. Surprisingly to many both motherboards do have native SATA. The SATA cable is a good idea but each PC has its own cables so those were swapped by chance.

Thank you FascistNation and Nasty.

I am going to have to give Macrium Reflect a chance as those speeds sound good. Only thing is since I have it copying data I am scared to restart the computer since I have something of a good thing going. (Yes I did restart it before to see if I could get the transfer speeds any better.)

Can Macrium Reflect copy to already partitioned space? I have plenty of free space but all of it has already been partitioned. I guess I am also wondering if it can restore to partitioned free space?

Ok Macrium Reflect is reporting about 6.2 Mb/s. It estimates it will complete in 58 hours which is a good improvement over the remaining 75 hours estimated for Xplorer2 This is for a 160 GB partition.


Should I do this with no compression or medium ?

That is hard to say. Compression requires CPU power and your system is limited, but compressed transfers faster.

I am greatly bothered by that transfer speed. It sounds like this is the best you can hope for. Were it me I would focus on grabbing the mydoc folder and maybe bookmarks/emails/PIM info.

Well I used compression. System Idle process is around 95-98 % so I guess the compression is not too bad. Using this or a normal copy my whole system is pretty laggy and slow. The mouse stutters some. I tried playing an mp3 from another drive for a minute and it just stutters. CPU must be waiting on a bunch of slow as molasses IO Interrupts?

Still working. Almost half way on the 160 GB partition. Then I will try the 300 GB minus the 80 GB I copied before I got Macrium Reflect. Hope I don't regret Macrium as sometimes backup programs have given me unrestoraeble backups before.

Drive is still not making strange sounds. Not too hot either. Transfer speed fluctuates between 6.5 and 11 Mb/s. The drive is mostly media files.

Any other advice let me know!

Thanks FascistNation. I managed to get everything copied off the drive. Thank you for recommending Macrium Reflect. It worked great.

I'm glad. I'd back that up now to another drive

You can run the Samsung ESTools now if you want to have some fun.

Also, if you are sure everything is off while the drive still works, I'd zero out the surface. (using secure erase on parted magic or copywipe would be my recommendation)

Then either recycle bin or take it apart and explore. Though check the circuit board...if the firmware revision number is the same as another one of your F3's (if it matches) it might be interesting to see if swapping a good board cured the transfer rates. If it didn't (meaning the drive and not the board was defective) then hanging onto the dying drive's board might come in handy one day.

Opening up and looking at the inside of the HDD (if it is indeed defective---if it was the board then the drive might come in handy some day) is fun and you can keep the magnets.